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The latest issue of the Transport Worker, the journal of the Rail and Maritime Union, carries an excellent article by Gordon Campbell on the decision, by KiwiRail, actively endorsed by the government, to build new rolling stock off-shore - a must read on a number of levels, include the astute observation that "where you have a CEO driven by a need for short term cost savings, this will generate decisions that often aren’t for the good of the company, the employees, the local community or the country as a whole”

-- Tom Watkins, a consultant, summarizes the corporate education reform movement's current strategy to the Sunday New York Times.

US journalist David Sirota, writing for Salon.com, describes how corporate reformers are using the fiscal crisis to hype an unproven school reforms ...

"The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change). Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism."

. With a little more than a year till the 2012 elections the White House and Congressional leadership are anxious to pass pending Free Trade Agreements (FTA) as soon as possible.

Most worrisome of all is the pending FTA between the US and Colombia. Corporate leaders and U.S. and Colombian government officials with their public relations operatives are peddling lie after lie to justify passage.The Alliance for Global Justice has put together a guide to help people better understand and counter the falsehoods they will be hearing and countering in the coming weeks.

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A rally of around a thousand unionists, HIV-Aids activists and social justice campaigners in Chicago sent a clear message to negotiators the day before the latest round of Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations began in Chicago.

Addressing the crowd, Chicago-based civil rights leader Jessie Jackson urged President Obama to address the problems of jobs and problems of poverty. That would not be delivered through more free trade deals on the NAFTA model that had only benefited the powerful corporations.

Proving that not all businesses support the corporate lobbies’ demands for the TPPA, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream called for trade agreements to be based on social justice and ethical business practices.

‘We want an agreement that puts people first and makes global trade an instrument of justice’, Cohen said.

Buying milk from their ice cream from local farmers was part of their commitment to the communities that bought their products. Fonterra’s ambitions to export more milk powder to the US when there was already a surplus of local made no sense.

The two iconic business leaders personally distributed free ice cream at the end of the rally.

The rally launches a series of activities over the coming week that are designed to highlight the impacts a TPPA could have on jobs, economic recovery, public health and democracy.

The 'war on terror' in Afghanistan and beyond has been the longest foreign war in New Zealand history, yet most New Zealanders know almost nothing about their country's part in it. For ten years, nearly everything controversial or potentially unpopular was kept secret, and obscured by a steady flow of military public relations stories.

Based on thousands of leaked New Zealand military and intelligence documents, extensive interviews with military and intelligence officers and eye-witness accounts from the soldiers on the ground, Nicky Hager tells the story of these years. New Zealand was far more involved than the public realised in this crucial period of world history. He tells how the military and bureaucracy used the war on terror to pursue private agendas, even when this meant misleading and ignoring the decisions of the elected government. .